From the window Joe and I watched father and son going down the walk, Simon sock-footed, taking mincing steps, a long boot in each hand. His father threw the guitar in the trunk, then came around to unlock the passenger door. We were relieved when he hugged the boy.
Downstairs, The Sex Pistols came on full throttle.
There are things you simply don’t understand until you have a child. You might think you know about love, for example, its rigours and complications, its thousand feats, but then it turns out that you don’t, that you’re clueless, that love, in point of fact, might as well be a Russian word. When Joe Jr. was born safe and whole, I felt such a sense of accomplishment. I had finally made a contribution. Finally something decisive, something that mattered to the world. This tiny, purple, squalling thing? I would die for him. It would be a privilege and a joy. I’d do it twice if I could.
But those groggy postpartum days don’t last. The hormonal frenzy, the ecstatic blear—it passes—and on the other side of bliss, it’s still there. Death is still there, more terrifying than before.
Not mine. His.
The next day we decided to let Joe Jr. skip school. Joe Sr. got up out of habit and cooked us a big fry-up. Joe Jr. slept through this olfactory alarm so Joe and I sat down together, overtired parents of a normally trouble-free teen. Then Joe’s pager went off and he had to leave for the hospital with three strips of bacon folded into a piece of toast. It was depressing to eat alone after the promise of company. Outside, spring flaunted herself against the window. She lifted her lacy skirts and bent over. Birds flew by with bits of grass in their beaks. How cliché, I thought.
I’d got as far as page 92 in the manuscript when mutterings began to issue from Joe Jr.’s room. He was on the phone to Simon, I assumed—until I heard pounding and went to find out what was going on.
“Nothing,” he said from behind his closed door.
I took a chance and opened it. He was on the bed, leaning against the wall, not on the phone at all, the laptop squeezed between his thighs and his hair flat—a bad sign. On the screen I could see bombs releasing every time his finger stabbed return. In the virtual city, people were scattering, escaping down cyber alleys, getting blown to bits.
“Dad made breakfast,” I said. Joe was at the hospital that very moment tending to the sick and wounded while his son skipped school to choreograph this massacre. Joe Jr. groaned and slammed the back of his head against the wall hard enough to make me jump. “Joey!”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Excuse me while I call 911.”
In the time it took us to exchange these few terse words, scores of innocents died or were dismembered with every manic palpation of the space bar. Each emitted a weird, synthesized A-a-a-a-a!!!, truncated by the next victim’s A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a!!!
“Have you heard from Simon?” I asked.
Joe Jr.: “There was a text.”
A-a-a!!! A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a!!! A-a-a-a!!! A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a!!!
“And?”
A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a!!!
“She’s taking his phone away.”
If his tone had been accusatory or even cold I would have taken comfort in it. I remembered being angry at my parents when I was his age. I even remembered hating them. But hate and anger are at least feelings. They connect you to people as much as love does. This glaze-eyed-killer-zombie son gave me the creeps. I said, “The woman’s a zilch, remember?”
A-a-a-a!!! A-a!!! A-a!!! A-a-a-a!!! A-a-a-a-a-a-a!!! A-a-a-aa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a!!!
It was because of the computer, I thought. When I was his age, the boob tube corrupted our minds. I wasn’t allowed to watch TV except in the company of my parents and then only edifying programs. There had been plenty of arguments about that. And because I never wanted to be that kind of parent, because I felt I was smarter than they, and because, admittedly, I stoop to flipping through parenting magazines at the grocery store where I tote away my organic vegetables in reusable canvas carriers or, when I’m stuck without, in recycled paper bags, I knew that I had to embrace these new technologies despite how they mystified and repelled me, so that I could speak a language common to my son.
So I asked. “Did you only Google me?”
“What?”
“Did you look up any of the other people in the group?”
“No.”
I thrilled when, after a pause to off a dozen more cyber citizens, he asked, “Why?”
“I just wondered. I haven’t either.”
He blasted a few more. A-a-a-a-a!!! A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a!!! “Why not?”
Just a tinge, a little tinge, of curiosity in his voice.
I left him alone while he ate his cold bacon and eggs. When he showed up in my office forty minutes later, he’d showered and looked more himself, more spiniferous anyway. The stud under his lip caught the light and blinked. “Hi,” I said.
“Do you want to do it?”
“All right,” I said, closing the editing file I’d been feigning work on. He pulled a chair over beside mine and, when he was settled, I let him do the work. His fingers are so nimble. Compared to his, mine move like I’m decoding Braille for the first time. He could have done this on his own, of course, but the fact that he didn’t was heartening.
He asked for a name and I gave him Dieter Koenig’s.
“That was easy. Usually there’s a lot of people with the same name. He’s a lawyer.”
I leaned in to read the home page on his site. “He’s partner in a firm that specializes in ICBC claims.” In other words, he makes his living suing the provincial auto insurance corporation. Think you have whiplash? You probably do! read one of the subject headings on his pull-down menu.
“What do you call a lawyer at the bottom of the ocean?” I asked.
“What?”
I told him, but he didn’t get it. “Never mind,” I said.
“Carla Steadperson” got no hits whatsoever, though there were a number of Carla Steadmans, one who was jailed for three months for shoplifting in England, another who worked for the Red Cross, and one who owned a tanning salon in, of all places, Hawaii. It was impossible to say which of these Carla Steadmans, if any, was the one I once knew, lark-voiced lesbian, serial scrawler of “Lies!” on newspaper boxes.
There were even more Timothy Brandts, among them an oncologist in Colorado, a specialist in spray-on foam roof insulation, and Timothy Brandt the actor, who had appeared in the Italian cult film Arpeggio. There were no Timos, but numerous Tim Brandts—a motivational speaker, a motocross racer, the victim of a fatal 1999 car accident. Of everyone in NAG!, it was Timo I had the clearest feelings for, an unadulterated, entirely unconflicted fondness, which made me loath to pick his fate even if it was only in my imagination. But if pressed, if I absolutely had to choose, I would like to have seen him towering on a podium, one pant leg rolled to the knee, stuttering hope the way he used to pass around the Chipits.
Belinda had changed her name again. We tried Isis, Goddess, Redhead. We tried that brand of hair conditioner.
Peter English turned out to be a fairly common name. His million-plus hits Joe Jr. quickly narrowed by adding “anarchist.” There were still more than a thousand references to him, many archived news articles, but also blogs which Joe Jr. read with fascination while I made and brought him a sandwich and stood by, biting my tongue, as he crumbed up my keyboard.
“He has a defence committee working for his release. They say he’s innocent, that he’s a political prisoner. His father was president of a mining company. He wouldn’t even pay for a lawyer!” Indignation in his voice.
I sighed.
“How did you get in with them anyway?” Joe Jr. asked.
“I came out here to go to university. I wanted to live closer to campus so I moved into a shared house with three of them.”
Joe Jr. took a break to go to the bathroom, but came back and threw himself into the chair again. He rubbed his eyes, then, instead of returning to the search, picked a book off the pile on the desk, as though pape
r had soothing properties the screen lacked. The book was Fathers and Sons, which I still hadn’t put back on the shelf. He flipped through it. “Look at all the underlining. Children! Is it true that love’s an imaginary feeling?”
We both laughed.
Like Pete, many of Sonia’s hits belonged to other people. Many of the ones that were hers were also Pete’s. And Joe was right about her lawyer. He was mentioned many times. Not only that, he was based in Vancouver. He would be as easy to contact as Dieter Koenig of Koenig, Hit, and Run.
“Anyone else?” Joe Jr. asked. He probably meant me. I hesitated, then told him, “No.” I didn’t remember Pascal’s last name, if I ever knew it.
But I must have. I’d read the article Sonia tied to the grate. What stuck in my mind was a word not a name.
Osteosarcoma.
They come as soon as they’re called, these dog-loyal tears. Joe Jr. pushed the chair back and, standing, launched into a Y—arms extending, fists unfurling, spreading. Suddenly he seemed so alive, as if some energy, some life force liberated by the stretch, was streaming off his fifteen-year-old body. He stayed like that, suspended, refracted green through my tears, for nearly half a minute until he remembered he was supposed to be mad at me. Then he dropped his arms and, rearranging his expression, turned to leave.
And what might happen to him if he walked through the door of my study now? Anything. I knew that for a fact. We had just read so many possible fates, every one of them unexpected, because all we had ever expected was to die.
Everybody dies.
And I thought—if I can hold him back for just a moment, something different will happen instead.
“Do you want to meet Sonia?” I asked.
I immediately regretted the offer, but, having made it, I had no choice but to phone. I talked to her lawyer’s secretary, who said she would pass the request along. As soon as I hung up I felt elated, not just for getting the call over with. It was like waking from a pleasant dream with the feeling sticking to you, but in this case the dream was a memory. I used to know Sonia’s timetable. It was tacked to the wall above her desk and I memorized it so I could correctly place her in my imagination throughout the day. It’s 11:20 so Sonia is in the Scarfe Building for Techniques in Reading Education. Whenever possible I tried to get home early and be in the kitchen making tea when she got in. Though my timetable didn’t always mesh with hers, next year, when we were living together, if we were still around, if the world hadn’t ended, I’d make sure it did. I’d choose my courses so that I would always be there for her. In the meantime, I stood by the kettle, urging it to boil, dried letters of spaghetti stuck to the ceiling, compost steeping in the bowl, the smell—beans, rotten table scraps, life, death—me poised and listening for the sound of the front door opening. Oh, joy.
But that was twenty years ago. We were two completely different people now. A ruined one and a saved one.
I was quite certain that she wouldn’t want to see me.
In this age of e-mail, the phone doesn’t ring that often any more. Every time it did I sprang for it, but it was never the lawyer’s secretary with the slightly nasal voice getting back to me as promised. Sonia’s lawyer must be busy these days with all those people trying to get off no-fly lists, all those terror suspects detained under security certificates, not to mention the ordinary addicts, prostitutes, and mentally ill needing counsel. For one quick glance at his website confirmed that she had engaged the St. Jude of the profession, a man no doubt kept extremely busy by injustice. The secretary didn’t call back that day, or the next.
Good, I thought.
At dinner Joe Sr. broached the subject of contacting Mr. and Ms. Zilch. “I think if we had them over they would see we’re not so bad. We don’t eat babies. We don’t do drugs.”
“Or do we?” I glanced sidelong at our sullen son.
“Your mother’s not a terrorist. She’s perfectly harmless. And she’s an excellent cook.”
“I’m not cooking dinner for that horrible woman,” I said.
“We could go to a restaurant then. The six of us. Talk it out. What do you think, Joey?”
He shrugged and put more food in.
Joe: “We’ll call them. The worst thing that could happen is they’ll say no.”
“Fine,” I said. “Call them.”
Joe said, “Who? Me?”
It became a mental mat routine, waking hopefully but quickly putting hope out of mind—because, logically, the likelihood that the secretary would call while I was hoping she would call was virtually nil. Not that I really wanted her to call. No, I did. I wanted her to call and say that Sonia didn’t want to see me any more than I wanted to see her. It was just that I had made this offer to my son, I would explain to the secretary. He’s going through a phase.
I focused on other things, on work, even as my mounting wretchedness subverted the plan; it proved I was hoping, subconsciously and in vain. Next move: rationalizing. It wasn’t as if Sonia wasn’t calling me. The secretary wasn’t. Sonia would have called me right away. Then, as four o’clock approached, I abandoned my faith in logic and entered the actively hoping phase, willing her to call, crossing fingers, muttering pleas. Because there were things I was desperate to know so that I could put it all behind me once and for all. Such as: why did she lie? Why did she say she was in any way involved?
Finally it hit, the devastation of five o’clock when legal offices everywhere closed for the day, followed ten minutes later by another bout of hope, for a lawyer like that, he’d work his clients’ hours. He’d hang his shingle out all night. Then the whole cycle started again until bedtime when, dejected, humiliated, I crawled between the sheets and had a little cry without waking Joe, who is long accustomed to these unexplained fits of sorrow and remorse.
The weekend came and went. Monday, the agony resumed. I was on page 376 of the novel when the proverbial moment of least expectation arrived, just as I was getting up from my desk to start dinner. Telemarketer Hour. The nasal secretary apologized for taking so long to call back. Sonia had given permission for me to call her.
It was a local number, which seemed too good to be true, but the woman who answered—she couldn’t have been Sonia. Only a lifetime passionately committed to smoking could produce such timbre. “Who’s this?” she asked.
“Tell her it’s Jane calling.”
“Jane?”
“Zwierzchowski,” I said.
“Who?”
1984
A mosaic of wet petals was pasted across the windshield. I wondered how Timo had driven over, for only now, while we were waiting out front in the van, did he put the wipers on. Swish, swish. They crushed and scraped the petals aside. He turned around to address us—Pete in the back corner, bristly, giving off a campfire fug, me hunkered in the middle seat, in misery. “Hey! We’re in the vvvvan! Remember? From the play?”
Dieter, up front in the passenger seat: “What’s taking them so long?”
Pete: “Honk.”
But the front door opened just then and Sonia hurried down the steps, arms floating at her sides as though about to take to the air and fly. She threw her small weight back, slid the van door open, hopped inside. “Pascal’s not coming,” she joyfully announced.
“Fuck,” said Pete. The other two asked why.
“He’s sick. He’s throwing up.” She got in beside me, tucking her pack at her feet.
“When did that start?”
“Just now.”
Hours earlier Pascal and Sonia’s laughter had woken me, then their thousand little kisses had kept me awake. Maybe they made love again, I don’t know—I stormed off to the bathroom so I wouldn’t have to listen a second time. Beside me now, she squeezed my hand to thank me. Everything about her glowed—her hair, washed that morning and lustrous, her face, flushing now that she was with the one person who knew, who knew more than she realized. She kept her eyes demurely lowered.
Pascal was not throwing up. I’d seen him myself through m
y bedroom window, leaving the garage with the garden gnome in his arms. It seemed a cumbersome souvenir to be taking all the way back to Saskatchewan on the bus.
“Is everybody ready then?” Timo asked, starting the van.
I pressed the side of my face to the cold window and shut my eyes. Sonia was still holding my hand.
Dieter: “Wait. Here he comes.”
Sonia let go of me and swung around. When she saw Pascal approaching the van, loaded down with his duffle bag, she tore her seat belt off. Pascal put his bag in the back and opened the side door at the same time as Sonia did. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Sorry,” he said, eyes darting at all of us.
“Are you coming or not?” Pete asked.
“I’m coming.”
“No,” Sonia said, pushing him back. “You’re sick. Remember?”
Pascal whooshed the door closed on its rollers and took the seat behind us, next to Pete. Immediately Sonia curled forward, as though over a stomach ache. At first I just sat there, in shock too, while Timo drove away. When we reached the Blenheim house a few minutes later, I forced myself to look back. Pascal blinked, one eye closing a fraction of a second before the other, which somehow suggested to me guilt, though nothing else on his face indicated he felt bad about what he’d done to Sonia. Carla and Isis were carrying a cardboard box and several plastic bags, which they loaded into the back too, along with their packs. Suddenly Pascal leaned forward and, taunt or benediction, placed a hand flat on the top of Sonia’s head. She jerked out from under his touch.
Carla, then Isis, climbed aboard. “How y’all doing this morning?” Isis asked as an American. As a Canadian she commented that we looked tense. “This ain’t good, y’all. It looks suspicious. How ’bout we take a sec to shake them jitters out?”
She, Carla, Timo, and Pascal hokey-pokeyed as best they could in the limited space of the van, Timo behind the wheel with barely enough room even to drive, let alone jiggle himself. He looked in the grip of some kind of seizure. The rest of us stayed planted in our seats for all our different reasons. Then Carla slid in beside Sonia, leaving Isis to Pascal.
Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling Page 43